Mike has another problem! I picked up a Lionel3454 merchandise car recently. At 14+ volts, the door opens and it really flips out the cubes. I notice that the couplers open and the coils get hot when unloading. Is this the nature of this car, or is some work needed to correct it?
I know you meant no double meaning, but given the train news of late, it was hard for me to not laugh a little. I can’t see Mike (as in Mike Wolf of MTH) being too interested in a Lionel car these days. And given the recent brew-ha-ha with Lionel and Neil Young and that his CoilCouplers “Hi-Rail Times” site has gone black… well how the times have changed when mention of coil couplers might mean a website as much as actual coil couplers.
To answer your question Mike, this is normal with operating cars that also had coil couplers. Postwar Lionel eventually did away with coil couplers being equipped on cars that also operated on the same slide shoe because of the same problem. That, and if you wanted to operate the car while hooked to a train, you were going to uncoupler the car whether desired or not.
As far as it getting hot, this is just the nature of a coil operated accessory. If you hold down the button on an uncoupling track for more than a second or two at a time, that too will get hot.
One solution would be to put some another postwar staple side truck on the car without coil couplers, but having the slide shoe, so that it operates without also activating the coil couplers too. I don’t know what else you could do without altering the car much more. Maybe one of the postwar experts here has another solution I’ve never heard of.
As a side note, I thin MTH makes the very best slide shoe truck. I’ve never had troubles running those as I have with some of the Lionel cars. I checked some years ago, and those MTH slide shoe trucks were not yet available as a separate part. Maybe they are now? Not that you would even consider such a move.
As one more side note, I have a couple of good condition clean postwar trucks with slide shoes and non-coil couplers if you had some other postwar trucks you’d want to trade, either metal or the postwar plastic AAR type.
One coupler should operate during unloading. The operating cars have their solenoid or whatever connected between the two coupler pickups. When you press the “unload” button, one pickup gets connected to the outside rails, the other to the center rail. The latter one is the one that will operate–whether you want it to or not! (The first one might also operate, since the design of the controller briefly supplies voltage to it through the operating solenoid before connecting it to the outside rails.)
(I posted this on the duplicate topic before I realized that there were two. Why don’t you delete that one before someone else answers it.)
The real reason they got rid of coil couplers was cost: the other kind were cheaper to make. The coupler coils shouldn’t get hot when unloading a merchandise car because you shouldn’t have to hold the button down to eject a cube; just a quick hit for each one should do the job. If you have to hold the button down for a long time to eject each cube the mechanism is probably sticky and/or binding. I did a total rebuild on one of these a few years ago and it operates quickly and easily, quickly snapping a cube out with each quick press of the button. A couple of things to check: make sure the solenoid and ratchet wheel operate freely and that the door slides with minimal resistance. These types of cars are wired so that pressing the uncouple button only operates the couplers but presssing the unload button operates both the unloading feature and one coupler.
Jim
Hey thanks Jim. I figured someone else would chime in on this. I too, can learn things here every time I check in on the forum. You explanation makes sense too. Just like the UC tracks, if it’s just a quick hit on the button… etc.
One thing I’ve noticed on the topic of heat, and UC tracks is that the postwar Lionel ones do not get as warm. The newer modern LTI ones get warm much quicker under repeated use. Probably postwar Lionel was using a differing qauge of wire wrap around the coil.
Always being a modern operator, over the years I’ve gained a lot of repsect for the designers at the orignal Lionel. And the rank and file of their factory: well thought out and well made products for the most part (save for the obvious cheap ones). I’ve taken postwar items that looked shot, like the metal staple side trucks, cleaned the rust off them and they still work - and now look/function great.
I too, have an operating merchandise car that was beat when I got it… which is why I got it. It’s amazing how well it works now after some TLC.
14 volts is a bit high for coil couplers or throwing merchandise. It does come in handy however when catzilla invades the layout. If you are running fixed voltage to the RCS or UCS section, get a small trainset transformer phased to the track transformer and adjust the RCS voltage to something more reasonable.
Phase doesn’t matter.
Phase matters when operating coil couplers because one side of the coil draws current from the outside rail (common).
John, consider that, in your house, half the loads operate off the black phase and half off the red phase. They all draw current from the same neutral, without any problem. I would be interested to know what you think would go wrong and why, if the train and uncoupler transformers were out of phase.